Science fiction and fantasy have been part of mainstream Russian literature since the 19th century. Russian fantasy developed from the centuries-old traditions of Russian mythology and folklore. Russian science fiction emerged in the mid-19th century and rose to its golden age during Soviet era, both in cinema and literature, with writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. With the fall of Iron Curtain, modern Russia experienced a renaissance of fantasy. Outside modern Russian borders, there are a significant number of Russophone writers and filmmakers from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, who have made a notable contribution to the genres.

In the Russian language, fantasy, science fiction, horror and all other related genres are considered a part of a larger umbrella term, фантастика (fantastika), roughly equivalent to "speculative fiction", and are less divided than in the West. The Russian term for science fiction is научная фантастика (nauchnaya fantastika), which can be literally translated as "science fantastique". Since there was very little adult-oriented fantasy fiction in Soviet times, Russians did not use a specific term for this genre until Perestroika. Although Russian language has a literal translation for 'fantasy', that is фантазия (fantaziya), the word refers to a dream or imagination, not literary genre. Today, Russian publishers and literary criticians use direct English transcription, фэнтези (fentezi). Gothic and supernatural stories are often referred to as мистика (mistika, Russian for mysticism), a term with no direct equivalent in the West.

By the mid-19th century imaginary voyages to space had become popular chapbooks, such as Voyage to the Sun and Planet Mercury and All the Visible and Invisible Worlds (1832) by Dmitry Sigov, Correspondence of a Moonman with an Earthman (1842) by Pyotr Mashkov, Voyage to the Moon in a Wonderful Machine (1844) by Semyon Dyachkov and Voyage in the Sun (1846) by Demokrit Terpinovich. Popular literature used fantastic motifs like demons (Rafail Zotov's Qin-Kiu-Tong), invisibility (Ivan Shteven's Magic Spectacles), shrinking men (Vasily Alferyev's Picture).

Alexander Veltman, along with his folk romances (Koschei the Immortal, 1833) and hoffmanesque satiric tales (New Yemelya or, Metamorphoses, 1845), in 1836 published Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii (The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon), the first Russian novel to feature time travel.[3] In the book, the main character rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff to meet Aristotle and Alexander the Great. Year 3448 (1833), a Heliodoric love romance set in the future, is also science-fictional; there, a traveler visits an imaginary Balkan country Bosphorania and sees social and technological advances of the 35th century.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's influential What Is to Be Done? (1863) included an utopian dream of the far future, which became a prototype for many socialist utopias. A noted example is the duology by Marxist philosopher and Lenin's adversary Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star and Engineer Menni. Some plays of another Marxist, Anatoly Lunacharsky, propone his philosophical ideas in fantastic disguise. Other examples of socialist utopias include Diary of André (1897) by pseudonymous A. Va-sky, On Another Planet (1901) by Porfiry Infantyev, Spring Feast (1910) by Nikolay Oliger. Alexander Kuprin wrote a short story of the same kind, Toast (1907).

Entertainment fiction adopted scientistic themes, such as resurrection of an ancient Roman (Extraordinary Story of a Resurrected Pompeian by Vasily Avenarius), global disaster (Struggle of the Worlds, 1900, by N. Kholodny; Under the Comet, 1910, by Simon Belsky), mindreading devices (a recurring theme in works by Andrey Zarin), Antarctic city-states (Under the Glass Dome, 1914, by Sergey Solomin), an elixir of longevity (Brothers of the Saint Cross, 1898, by Nikolay Shelonsky), Atlantis ("Atlantis", 1913, by Larisa Reisner).

Spaceflight remained a central science fiction topic since the 1890s in In the Ocean of Stars (1892) by Anany Lyakide, In the Moon (1893) and Dreams of Earth and Skies (1895) by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Voyage to Mars (1901) by Leonid Bogoyavlensky, "In Space" (1908) by Nikolay Morozov, Sailing Ether (1913) by Boris Krasnogorsky and its sequel, Islands of Ethereal Ocean (1914, co-authored by astronomer Daniil Svyatsky).

In the 1910s Russian audience grew interested in horror . Fire-Blossom, a supernatural thriller by Alexander Amfiteatrov and Vera Kryzhanovsky's occult romances, that combined science fiction and reactionary elitist utopia, were popular. Bram Stoker's Dracula was imitated by pseudonymous "b. Olshevri" (= "more lies" in Russian) in Vampires, even before the original was translated to Russian. Early Alexander Grin's stories are mostly psychological horror (he borrowed much from Ambrose Bierce), though later he drifted to a more literary kinds of fantasy.

Future progress was described in fiction by scientists: "Wonders of Electricity" (1884) by electric engineer Vladimir Chikolev, Automatic Underground Railway (1902) by Alexander Rodnykh, "Billionaire's Testament" (1904) by biologist Porfiry Bakhmetyev. Future war stories were produced by the military (Cruiser "Russian Hope", 1887, and Fatal War of 18.., 1889, by retired navy officer Alexander Belomor; Big Fist or Chinese-European War, 1900, by K. Golokhvastov, Queen of the World (1908) and Kings of the Air (1909) by navy officer Vladimir Semyonov; "War of Nations 1921-1923" (1912) by Ix, War of the "Ring" with the "Union" (1913) by P. R-tsky, End of War, 1915, by Lev Zhdanov). Threat to the World (1914) by Ivan Ryapasov (who styled himself "Ural Jules Verne") is alike Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune, but the villain is an Englishman. Jules Verne was so widely read that Anton Chekhov wrote a parody on him, and Konstantin Sluchevsky produced a sequel - "Captain Nemo in Russia" (1898).

Soviet era was the golden age of Russian science fiction.[5] Soviet writers were innovative, numerous and prolific,[6] despite limitations set up by state censorship. Both Russian and foreign writers of science fiction enjoyed mainstream popularity in the Soviet Union, and many books were adapted for film and animation.

Science fiction books from 1920s included science predictions, adventure, space travel, often with a hue of working class agenda and satire against capitalism.[8][9][10] Alexey N. Tolstoy's Aelita (1923), one of the most influential books of the era, featured two Russians raising a revolution on Mars. Tolstoy's Engineer Garin's Death Ray (1926) follows a mad scientist who plans to take over the world, and he's eventually welcomed by capitalists. Similarly, main antagonist of Belayev's The Air Seller (1929) is a megalomaniac capitalist who plots to steal all the world's atmosphere. Belayev's Battle in Ether (1928) is about a future world war, fought between communist Europe and capitalist America.

Soviet authors were also interested in the distant past. Belayev described his view of "historical" Atlantis in The Last Man from Atlantis (1926), and Obruchev is best known for Plutonia (written in 1915, before Revolution, but only published in 1924), set inside hollow Earth where dinosaurs and other extinct species survived, as well as for his other "lost world" novel, Sannikov Land (1924).

Two notable exclusions from Soviet 'Wellsian' tradition were Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of dystopian novel We (1924), and Mikhail Bulgakov, who contributed to science fiction with Heart of a Dog (1925), The Fatal Eggs (1925) and Ivan Vasilyevich (1936). The two used science fiction for social satire rather than scientistic prediction, and challenged the traditional communist worldview. Some of their books were refused or even banned and only became officially published in the 1980s. Nevertheless, Zamyatin and especially Bulgakov became relatively well-known through circulation of fan-made copies.

The following Stalin's era, from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, saw a period of stagnation in Soviet science fiction, because of heavy censorship that forced the writers to adopt socialist realism cliches. Science fiction of this period is called "close aim". Instead of distant future, it was set in "tomorrow", and limited itself to anticipation of industrial achievements, inventions and travels within Solar system. The top "close aim" writers were Alexander Kazantsev, Georgy Martynov, Vladimir Savchenko and Georgy Gurevich.

In films the "close aim" era lasted longer, and many films based on "close aim" books and scripts were made in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these films, namely Planet of the Storms (1962) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959), were pirated, re-edited and released in the West under different titles.[11]

In the second half of the 20th century, Soviet science fiction authors, inspired by the Thaw period of the 1950 and 1960s and the country's space pioneering, developed a more varied and complex approach. The liberties of genre offered Soviet writers a loophole for free expression. Social science fiction, concerned with philosophy, ethics, utopian and dystopian ideas, became the prevalent subgenre.[12] Most of Soviet writers still portrayed the future Earth optimistically, as a communist utopia - some did it frankly, some to please publishers and avoid censorship. Postapocalyptic and dystopian plots were usually placed outside Earth — on underdeveloped planets, distant past, parallel worlds. Nevertheless, the settings occasionally bore allusion of the real world, and could serve as a satire of contemporary society.

Space opera subgenre was less developed, because both state censors and "highbrow" intelligentsia writers watched it unfavorably. Nevertheless, there were moderately successful attempts to adapt space westerns to Soviet soil. The first was Alexander Kolpakov with "Griada" (1960), after came Sergey Snegov with Humans as Gods trilogy (1966—1977), among others.

A specific branch of both science fiction and children's books appeared in mid-Soviet era: the children's science fiction. It was meant to educate children while enterteining them. The star of the genre was Bulychov,[7][13] who, along with his adult books, created Alisa Selezneva, children's space adventure series about a teenage girl from the future. Others include Nikolay Nosov with his books about dwarf Neznayka, Evgeny Veltistov, who wrote about robot boy Electronic, Vitaly Melentyev, Yan Larri, Vladislav Krapivin, Vitaly Gubarev.

Despite genre's popularity, Soviet Union had a very few media dedicated solely to science fiction, and most of it were fanzines, released by SF fan clubs. SF short stories were usually present in either popular science magazines, such as Tekhnika Molodezhi, Vokrug sveta and Uralsky Sledopyt, or in literary antologies, such as Mir Priklyucheniy, that also included adventure, history and mystery.

Any sort of literature that dealt seriously with the supernatural, either horror, adult-oriented fantasy or magic realism, was unwelcomed by Soviet censors. Until the 1980s very few books in these genres were written, and even fewer were published, although earlier books, such as by Gogol, were not banned. Of the rare exceptions, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita (not published in author's lifetime), Strugatskies in Monday Begins on Saturday and Vladimir Orlov in Altist Danilov introduced magic and mystical creatures into contemporary Soviet reality in a satirical and fabulous manner. Another exception was early Soviet writer Alexander Grin, who wrote romantic tales, both realistic and fantastic. Magic and other fantasy themes occasionally appeared in theatrical plays by Evgeny Shvarts, Grigory Gorin and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their plays were family-oriented fables, where supernatural elements served as an allegory. Supernatural horror genre, by contrast, was almost completely eliminated by censors' demands for every media to be modest and family-friendly.

In science fiction, with communist censorship gone, many various portrayals of future appeared, including dystopias. Post-apocalyptic fiction, time travel and alternate history are among the most popular genres, represented by authors like Vyacheslav Rybakov, Yuri Nikitin, among many others. Overuse of fish-out-of-water plots for time travel and parallel worlds led Russian SF&F journalists to coin the ironic slur popadanets (Rus. попаданец, lit. getter) for such characters. There are still many writers of traditional space-related science fiction including space operas, such as Alexander Zorich (Tomorrow War series), Lukyanenko (Lord from Planet Earth), Andrey Livadny, among others. Late 2000s and early 2010s saw a rise of Russian Steampunk, with such books as Alexey Pekhov's Mockingbird (2009), Vadim Panov's Hermeticon (2011), and Gray F. Green's (a collective pen name) Cetopolis (2012).

A large part of modern Russian SF&F is written in Ukraine,[14] especially in its "sci-fi capital", Kharkiv,[15] home to H. L. Oldie, Alexander Zorich, Yuri Nikitin and Andrey Valentinov. Many others hail from Kiev, including Marina and Sergey Dyachenko[16] and Vladimir Arenev. Belarusian authors, such as Olga Gromyko, Kirill Benediktov, Yuri Brayder and Nikolai Chadovich, also contributed to the genres. Some authors, namely Kamsha, Dyachenkos and Frei, were born in Ukraine and moved to Russia at some point. Most Ukrainian and Belarusian SF&F authors write in Russian, which gives them access to a broad Russophone audience of the post-Soviet countries, and usually publish their books via Russian publishers such as Eksmo, Azbuka and AST.

In the post-soviet fantasy and science fiction, the extensive serializing of successful formulas has become usual. Most notable are the two postapocalyptic book series based on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. computer game and Metro 2033 novel, both of which featured a well-developed universe. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. book series' features are heavy branding and almost negligible influence of the actual writer's name on individual novels (also, a TV show is in development).[17] And though Metro 2033 raised its creator Dmitry Glukhovsky to national fame, it quickly developed into a franchise, with over 15 books published by various authors[18] and spanned a tie-in videogame.

Production of science fiction films and fantasy films in modern Russia dropped in comparison to the Soviet cinema, due to high costs of visual effects. Throughout 1990s, almost no movies in this genres were made. In the 2000s and 2010s, however, Russia once again produced a number of films.

^McGuire, Patrick L. (1985). Red stars: political aspects of Soviet science fiction. Issue 7 of Studies in speculative fiction. UMI Research Press.
"The Soviet Union has more professional science fiction writers than any country in the world except the United States and possibly Britain, and many of these writers are talented".

H. L. Oldie: "Speculative fiction in Ukrainian is living through a hard time today... Speaking of fiction written by Ukrainian citizens, regardless of language (primarily Russian, of course), there's a brighter picture. More than 30 fantasy and science fiction writers are active here, their books are regularly published (in Russia, mostly), they enjoy the readers' love they deserve; many are recipients of prestigious literary awards, including international".